Old published stuff

posted by Stewart Turner Over a grimly familiar montage of short-skirted teenage girls staggering around vomit-splattered streets and being wheeled around the nation’s overworked A&E departments, one expert summed it all up in shocking terms: "This is the first generation that’re going to die younger than their parents." And if the cerebrally challenged kids shown in last night's opening episode of The Hospital are typical, it’s not too hard to see why. Despite the last Government pumping millions into awareness campaigns, 25-year-old Michael reckons that chlamydia is “a rite of passage”, something to mark your transition from boy to man not unlike your first pint of beer in a pub. Michael “can’t remember” whether he’s had three or four partners in the last month. After his appearance last night, it’s unlikely he’ll be getting too many offers in August. Then there was Stacey, a swaggering youth who demanded to see a female doctor because the male do...

Posted by Stewart Turner My New TV Career would perhaps have been a more appropriate title for lingerie model Danielle Lineker’s look at the heartbreaking world of family break-ups. Certainly there was little in the way of insight in this hour long piece of fluff. Instead the whole thing played like a moving Hello! magazine centrespread – all long, lingering shots over wedding photos on the mantelpiece and clips of the Linekers putting out mince pies for Santa at Christmas. So what did we learn? Well, the Match of the Day man’s not too clever with a barbecue for one, and I doubt whether his undercooked chicken breasts and sorry-looking sausages did much to foster family harmony in the newly-extended Lineker household. Oh, and we also learned that the hassles of press attention mean Danielle, Gary and the kids have it even trickier than most new families. “Nothing’s ever that private,” Danielle explained to the TV documentary maker mournfully. The film mainly centred...

Posted by Stewart Turner Are cows really “one of the most successful species on the planet”? If you define success in terms of being escorted down to the abattoir at the age of six months or having your teats squeezed dry to make our Coco Pops more palatable, presenter Jimmy Doherty probably had a point. But Jimmy didn’t stop there, even claiming we have a “special relationship” with our bovine friends. I’m not convinced: We give them a decrepit old shed, an occasional change of hay and an electric fence; they give us a few gallons of milk and a couple of kilos of sirloin in return. It all seems slightly one-sided. Perhaps not for much longer. The Private Life of Cows revealed a hitherto unknown intelligence that suggested the bovine population might only be a few decades away from escaping their chains and mounting an uprising. To prove this, affable Jimmy ran through a series of experiments to reveal just how clever cows really are. First he taught them to ring a bell to ask for food...

Posted by Stewart Turner Oil Disaster: The Rig That Blew Up was never going to win any awards for its less-than-imaginative title, and true to Five’s form, this hastily cobbled together documentary about one of the planet’s worst ever ecological disasters was less than brilliant. If you tuned in expecting an in-depth assessment of the ecological impact of the explosion of Deepwater Horizon, or a look at the subsequent political fallout and President Obama’s Brit-bashing in the weeks following, you’d have been seriously disappointed. For this is Five, a channel which sticks Ice Road Truckers on at primetime and seems to be courting a target audience of blokes who get their kicks watching massive bits of machinery been driven around by Americans with handlebar moustaches. It takes all sorts. Oil Disaster focussed primarily on those first few nights after the BP-owned rig suffered a massive blowout with 126 people on board, and the efforts of the emergency services and specialists who ...